Spending forever in prison/A reaction to UFC

Off-topic
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Since Christianity is now back on the front page of JC, I thought I’d create a new thread as a reaction to it rather than further pollute the UFC thread(s):

While I was cruising the net, when I bumped into this blog.

http://operationsuccess.blogspot.com/2007/01/spending-forever-in-prison.html

It’s basically a blogger who uses spending forever in prison as an analogy for going to hell. It implied that you should believe in the teaching of the bible because if you’re wrong you will go to hell. It reminded me of when I was younger, and I first began to stray from my religion (I was raised Christian).

I remember being dragged to a church rock concert event by a friend. I enjoyed the music, but then the singer started asking for new believers to come on stage, and spoke of how they were now saved. He said that before they were going to hell, and now that they were “saved” since they believed, they were going to heaven.

I still believed in god, however, I couldn’t wrap my mind around a religion that requires belief as a requirement to get into heaven. It seemed obvious to me that a person who tried to be a good person should get into heaven, regardless of whether or not they believed in god. I couldn’t conceive of a god to whom it mattered whether or not a person believed in him. Doesn’t seem arrogant that god would require worship and belief? Any god I could believe in would not be arrogant.

Furthermore, how good can a person truly be if the only reason they act in a moral fashion is the fear of hell. Isn’t a person who performs acts of charity and lives in a moral fashion without being motivated by the threat of hell truely a better person?

In that church, on that evening, I stopped being christian. I knew that if there was a god, these would never be his/her words.

In a recent youtube video featuring Richard Dawkins (Author of “The god delusion”), he is asked “What if you are wrong?”. From the christian perspective, the answer obviously would be that he would go to hell.

His answer is that the only reason (arguably) that a person follows the faith that they do is because of who their parents are and the place and time of his birth. He replies back to the person who asked the question with “What if YOU’RE wrong?” This seems true enough. If you’re born in the US, you’ve got a good chance of being christian. If you’re born in the middle-east, you’d likely be a muslim. If you’re born in south-east asia, you’d probably be buddhist. Since many religions require that you follow their beliefs to get into heaven, as a christian, you are running the risk of being wrong and ending up in some non-christian hell. Interesting isn’t it? You have the chance of going to so many different hells, but only one heaven.

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Sounds kinda like me. It wasn’t an event though, just gradual realization.

This isn’t poking fun at your age, but they had Christian rock back then? I thought that was a fairly recent thing.

Edit: I just read the blog…it’s not logical at all. The very thing he uses to promote belief erases it. You can’t force yourself to believe something.

This seems to fit here well.

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That’s why it’s a good idea to always carry one of these with you in case of a fatal accident:

jail.jpg

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For me, it was gradual as well, but I do remember this concert as being a turning point.

…and they’ve had Christian rock as long as I can remember and it’s probably been around almost as long as rock has been around.

I’m familiar with Pascal’s Wager. One reason why it doesn’t work is that if you only believe as a way hedging a bet, then you don’t really believe at all.

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A friend of mine once got out of a ticket by handing one of these to a cop …or so he says.

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Well. I feel ignorant. :o

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and I feel old :wink:

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There’s a cure for ignorance…:smiley: :stuck_out_tongue:

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True. …and you get it as you get older :stuck_out_tongue:

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mscalisi: 1
monkeyman: 0

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Reminds me of this one quote I heard once, “Religion is for people who are afraid of Hell, spirituality is for people who have been through it,” I donno if I agree with it really, but it is a good one to think about.

Anyway, I don’t deal with theistic religions anymore…I think that if there is a God or Gods, He, She, or They didn’t create us just for us to worship Him, Her, or They, He, She or They must have created us to do something with our lives…I don’t know what, be a good person, or something silly like that. And I definitely don’t believe in Hell at all, a God wouldn’t put us on this Earth, make us who we are, and then punish us for eternity for it. Jack Kerouac wrote in The Dharma Bums about Hell, he wrote, “Life’s already shoved an iron foot down my mouth. But I don’t think Hell is anything but a dream cooked up by some hysterical monks who didn’t understand Buddha’s peace under the Bo Tree or for that matter Christ’s peace looking down on the heads of his tormentors and forgiving them.”
Makes sense to me.
I think the biggest thing that turned me away from any single organized religion is that some people (say, Christians) believe their point of view so strongly and say “how is it possible that anything else could ever be true?” And another group of people with completely different beliefs say exactly the same thing with exactly the same strength of belief…and so. The obvious, logical solution is that both groups are wrong. OR maybe that both groups are right, perhaps every belief is right, Gandhi said (I’m using a lot of quotes in this post, aren’t I) that all religions are true.

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fantastic quote: it will help me explain why you can communicate through spirituality AND be a hard-core atheist!
the sad side of this is that people advertise religion as an insurance to withstand real hell on earth … since it works with many people (who find solace in religion through hard times) it is very hard to explain that you can do the same without religion.